“Minerva,” he murmured to the goddess of all battle strategy. “Be with us.”

His grip tightened. The howls assailed his ears as the dark swarm flooded over the frozen river.

Except—the river—

“Oh, gods,” he whispered. “Oh gods, yes!” Not Minerva, but Fortuna—Fortuna, goddess of luck, who had just passed over his head in a rustle of golden wings.

“What?” Trajan wheeled his horse, already looking back toward the battle.

The second wave of Germans surged out over the frozen river as Trajan surged up the embankment. Paulinus almost thought he could hear the ice creak—and then it broke. A cluster of Germans shrieked as they plunged into the frigid water.

“The sun,” said Trajan unbelievingly. “This crazy sun.” Howling abated as the Germans fell back. They regrouped. Sallied forward again. An entire shelf of ice fell away, and the front rank of savages disappeared into the Rhine. Even over the clash of battle they could hear the screams, the splashes, the sounds of drowning. The head mounted on the champion’s shield bobbed loose, grinning up at the sun as the champion himself drowned gurgling in his bearskin.

Paulinus whirled on his aide. “Sound the attack. Press Saturninus back against the hill.” His aides scattered, grinning, and trumpets began to bugle. Trajan let out a whoop. Paulinus leaned down from the saddle, plucked up a spear, hefted it.

Trajan grinned. “Shall we?”

YOU’RE alive!” Lappius mopped at his round face. He looked ten years older. All about him fluttered the slaves and the women, wide-eyed at the sight of the two grimy soldiers in their midst. “By Jove, if you’d died in this rebellion—Paulinus?”

“He’s dazed,” Trajan said over Paulinus’s head. “He made himself a hero.”

Paulinus blinked. He was alive. He didn’t quite believe it.

“—cut his way up the hill toward Saturninus himself—”

A party of Lappius’s young courtiers grinned at Paulinus, slapping him on the shoulder and mouthing congratulations. Paulinus looked through them in a fog, thinking of Saturninus. Just a soldier who wanted real work instead of cattle shows and sullen natives . . . He’d had some idea of killing Saturninus himself, but he came up the hill and found that the man had stabbed himself through the gut. He’d stared up at Paulinus, his eyes full of blood, dying slowly, and Paulinus drove a gladius through his heart to put him out of his agony. Trajan found Paulinus with his back to a tree and Saturninus’s severed head beside his hand.

“—The Fourteenth is slaughtered, and the Eleventh is running. They’ll be lucky to get off with decimation.”

He found himself wishing Saturninus had killed him instead. There was Lepida to face, now, and his father, and even the battle hadn’t restored anything. Everything was hard again. In the middle of the fight it had all been simple.

“—hunting down the last of the savages, but I’ll wager not one in ten got out of the Rhine—”

A fat woman in a pink stola moaned relief and fainted. The slaves fluttered ineffectually around her. Paulinus stared at her plump white legs until Trajan grabbed his arm and tugged him out again. The rest of the day—the rest of the week—moved by in a whirl. Trajan hunted down the rebellious legionnaires with relish. Saturninus’s hacked-apart body was publicly displayed outside the governor’s palace and left to rot: a warning to all other would-be usurpers. Everywhere Paulinus and Trajan rode, the citizens clapped and the legionnaires banged their shields. “Stop wincing,” Trajan grinned. “We’re heroes.”